—For you—
by TheSoggyBug
Summary: Oneshot of what happened when Ky and Cassia snuck away under the stars in "Crossed". One night isn't too much to ask for, is it? Choppy and not really finished, but displays their feelings alright, I think. Read and review, please!


_There is the funniest reason behind this oneshot. Every time I think about it I grin._

_This fanfiction is dedicated to my beautiful, hilarious, completely ridiculous friend, Hannah, who helped me come up with the idea for this story. You're the best friend ever. _

_**Disclaimer**__: I do not own any characters or anything from Matched or Crossed, sadly. _

_Obviously there's going to be a great deal of fluff. There's not necessarily going to be a certain plot. There might be some choppiness, but HECK it was fun to write. Ohohoho…_

_(I'm used to writing everything in past-tense, so if you see a little error in the tenses, please forgive me.)_

_**(Oh, and I'm going to start out at the end of chapter 26 in Crossed, so the first little bit is written by Ally Condie.)**_

**oOo**

"For one night, can we just think of each other? Not the Society or the Rising or even our families?"

"No," I say.

"No what?" He tangles one of his hands in my hair, the other draws me closer still.

"No, I don't think we can," I say. "And no, it isn't too much to ask."

Even in the darkness of the night, I can see Ky's grin. It's tired and small, but more real than ever.

"I understand," he says quietly, grin melting into a more serious expression. "It's...pretty impossible to forget about any of that. The Society, the Rising, the people we love back home. I know because I have nightmares about all of that almost every night."

Feeling my brow pucker, I reach up to put a gentle hand on his cheek. "Why don't you wake me? I'm always here to talk to."

"I don't want to share any of my nightmares with you." The chilly night air shifts around us as I feel Ky lean closer and put his lips near my left temple. "I can't count the times I've watched you…suffer."

An involuntary shiver goes up my spine. Though I don't admit it, I have nightmares, too. "You know," I swallow, "just because I said I couldn't…not think about all those things for a night, that doesn't mean we have to talk about it."

Ky drew away a little. "Do you not want to talk about it?" He sees me shaking my head and gives me a small kiss between the eyes. "Okay. I'm sorry."

To my great disappointment, after remembering a particular nightmare, I no longer feel the joy and satisfaction of sneaking out with Ky. I hope the dark outside covers up my unhappiness, but of course, it was too much to hope for.

"Did I upset you, Cassia?" Ky takes his hands away from my neck and studies me. From what little light shared by the sliver moon, I see specks dancing off of his dark eyelashes. "You don't look happy anymore. You aren't smiling."

Swallowing the frown, I look back up at him and smile. "I'm not upset."

The light specks shift on Ky's eyelashes as he puts his arms comfortingly around me and leans in. "…I can see the stars in your eyes," he says softly, and then cracks a grin. "I'm afraid if we do anything but stand here we might tumble right off this cliff."

The ledge we're on really isn't putting us in too much danger, but hearing him say that and the tickle of his lips on my throat makes me let out a loud, unattractive laugh.

Ky starts laughing, too, but he suddenly puts his hand over my mouth and shushes me between quiet sniggers. "You're going to wake Eli and Indie!"

"Oh, hush. If anyone's going to wake them, it would be you." I pry his hand from my mouth and skip away from him teasingly, edging further along the path, only pausing to glance back at him.

"Where are you going?" he asks me in a hushed voice, following my steps along the narrow path. "Cassia?"

When I feel his hand touch my back, I pause and turn around again. "Just down. So we don't fall and kill ourselves."

A confused silence answers.

"And we can laugh all we want; no one will hear." I skip down the cliff a few more feet. "We'll have the whole place to ourselves."

The spot we—Ky, Indie, Eli and I—had chosen was a days' walk away from the township. There was no sign of civilization anywhere except for the caves spotted up in the cliffs. Narrow paths lead down from each one, thankfully not requiring any climbing. With luck we could hide out under a slab of protruding cliff and maybe sit around a fire. The images in my head are by far idealistic, but far better than any "real" thing that can go wrong.

"Okay, Cassia, okay," Ky grabs my wrist before I could go any further. Something cold and metal is pressed into my hands. "At least use a light so you don't accidentally wander off the edge."

Once again feeling that delight from being with him, I switch the flashlight on and shine it under my chin, letting the light illuminate my face from below. "Hey, Ky," I whisper, leaning in to smile mischievously at him. "Come here."

Raising an eyebrow, he does so, taking a few steps forwards until he's within arm's length.

"Closer."

Another few steps and his face was just inches from mine. I saw the amusement and curiosity in his eyes. "Yes, Miss Reyes?"

I click off the flashlight and kiss him.

Ky smiles a little and accepts the kiss eagerly, but pulls away a few seconds later, ears pricked like a cat.

"…I think Eli's stirring," he says to me in a voice so quiet I barely heard him. "Come on."

Walking swiftly in a single-file line, we sneak down a continuous ridge on the cliff until we are only about five feet from the ground.

Ky leaps down first and he holds his arms up to me. "Jump. I'll catch you."

Trusting him whole-heartedly, I get onto my backside and slide down. As he promised, Ky catches me, and then spins me in a circle. "We did it."

"Over here," Grabbing Ky's hand, I drag him along the cliff face until we get to an overhanging slab of cliff. Though we are most likely unable to spot from the sky, we can still see the stars when laying on our backs, which we do.

My head lays on his shoulder and our right hands entwine.

"Hey, Ky?" I ask him quietly, watching a tiny speck of light streak across the sky.

"Mm?"

"…Where are we going? We can't go home…" Part of me aches a little, burning like a low fire under my heart at the memory of my family. "What if we die out here?"

"I'm not going to let you die, Cassia." He sounds so sure of himself.

"But what if something happens? What if we're the target of another firing or…or something?"

Ky buries his face in my hair and kisses the nape of my neck. "…Then we'll just have to make the best of the time we've got left."

I can hear the tone in his voice, and it isn't at all serious like all the other times we've talked about such a subject. It's very free and teasing and even a little mischievous. I can't help but tilt my head back and laugh quietly.

"What's so funny?" he asks, but I hear the smile. "Cassia?"

Still giggling, I roll onto my side and put my arms around his neck, pressing up against him until only our faces weren't touching. "I'm just wondering what you meant by that. Are you going to make me guess?"

Ky's eyes twinkle brighter than the stars above us and he wiggles his fingers on my hips. "Yes, I am. Guess."

"Did you mea—"

"WRONG." He pulls me onto him and makes some crazy animal sound against my throat. "Guess again."

"What did you think I was going to say?" I ask, trying not to scream and twist away from his lips on my _very_ ticklish neck. When I manage to tug away from him enough to see his eyes, they have a look in them that I think I might know and don't like. My smile drops. "Ky," I begin to say, sitting up. "W—"

Ky's own happy smile automatically disappears when he sees my reaction. "I—Cassia, I didn't mean…" His attempts for excuses were lost into the frosty air.

"You know we-we can't." Even thinking about it brings on the most embarrassing of blushes. How can he even _think_ that way? "It's not…it's not right."

"Says who?" Ky asks softly, neither playful nor snarky. "The Society?"

I'm quiet.

"They've been wrong about a lot of things."

"Things like choosing who you love and when you die." My voice rises with defense even though I'm not sure why this is making me freak out so much. "Though those are obviously screwed up, our morals are still here."

"Like what?" Ky laughs bitterly. "They've planted just about everything in our minds. It's wrong to even _look_ at the opposite sex before you're matched, and after you can only look at your match. You can't have kids over a certain age, you can't have kids before a certain age. If they're wrong about all of that, who says they're not wrong about sex?"

I'm getting really uncomfortable now. Being away from Ky's arms made it cold, but I don't snuggle back up next to him. "Those exact thoughts are why we were so corrupted before, Ky. I understand we're not doing much better today, but we're…we're so _young_."

"Old enough for them to work us to death," he says flatly. "I'm just starting to rethink everything about how we were raised. If one thing was wrong, what's not to say the entire thing was?" The upset in his voice is obvious, but even though I don't approve of his ideas, I don't like him being upset.

Scooting over to press my body against his again, I wrap my arms around him apologetically. "I don't know, Ky. I just don't. But I don't want to take any chances. You know what could happen when…if…"

He doesn't respond immediately. I know I upset him, but I don't see why he has to be that way. He _knows_ it's wrong. Or…doesn't he? I mean, my parents raised me for many, many years on such morals and beliefs. Though the Society is wrong about a lot of things, does that mean that everything I was raised on has been wrong?

Could _I_ be wrong?"

Ky must know that I can't risk any…any pregnancy.

I know that my cheeks are growing hotter by the second. Even _thinking_ about pregnancy makes me uncomfortable, but who says the Society hadn't been…drugging us? That they've put some sort of…contraceptive in our food until we're of child-bearing age? If so, I'm not safe. But perhaps our schoolteachers were right (I'd thought they were lying for a while), that our bodies simply weren't ready and would only begin bearing 21—even that number was a little earlier than preferred. Though I know how children are made and how puberty works, right at this moment, I begin to question it. I know it's pointless, but I can dream.

Swallowing back distress, I peek my eyes up into Ky's and after a second of boring into them desperately, he looks back at me.

"Sorry to ruin the moment," he says, almost bitterly, and reaches up to touch my cheek with a single finger. "You're right. Having a kid would definitely put a damper on our plans for the Rising."

I can't help but shiver a little. "How can you talk about it so easily?"

"What? The Rising?"

"No…" I blush again. "Having a…having a kid. This young. I don't know how you can even talk about it."

"…I think about it a lot, actually," Ky admits, narrowing his blue eyes thoughtfully. "If we weren't aberrations and…well, I think we'd be a lot _worse_ than aberrations now, wouldn't we? Running away like this. But anyways… If things had gone differently…and we were accepted by the Society as a Match, _would_ we have had kids?"

I'm unable to speak, whether out of embarrassment or something else. Thoughts un through my head at lightning speed, only staying long enough for me to get annoyed about it.

I love Ky, but the circumstances have never allowed me to think about that. I'd thought about the probability of children with Xander, before our lives went haywire. Before I fell in love with someone else. Now, presented with the facts, I have to rethink everything.

Ky isn't done.

"If we manage to settle our lives down now, will we?"

"Have children?" I laugh bitterly, sitting up and wrapping my arms around my knees. "Will our lives _ever_ settle down?"

Ky sits up, too, and mimics my pose, staring out at the stars with a blank expression. His dark, overgrown hair hangs in front of his eyes and touches almost to his shoulders, and he doesn't brush it away.

Feeling slightly guilty, I reach over and do it for him.

Without saying anything, Ky stands and offers his hand down to me.

"Are we going back up?" I ask miserably, more guilt unraveling inside my chest and making me feel sick.

Oddly, the uneasy air of the moment passes abruptly and Ky just grins down at me, eyes twinkling with the light of the night sky.

"No," he says, still grinning. "I'm fulfilling a promise I made."

As long as we weren't going back… I gladly lace my fingers with his and let him pull me up to a standing position.

"What promise?" I ask.

He smiled some more. "I said I'd show you how to dance, didn't I?"

Dancing? Ky's going to dance with me? Nervous, I stay obedient and astute to his actions as he gently puts one of my hands on his shoulder and wraps the other in his right, sliding his free hand down to my hip. I'd seen my mother and father do this on rare occasion, holding each other close and twirling around, though I've never done it myself. So when Ky and I begin rotating in a circle, I have a slight idea what we're doing.

We start out slow. Our feet crunch the dirt of the canyon floor in harmony, trying not to step on each other but slipping every now and then. The stars above us twirl, too, seeming to turn colors in the velvety blue. And I'm suddenly aware of Ky how I'm normally not.

The heat radiating from all around, his lips just barely brushing against my cheek, sending fireworks shooting into the sky. Even through his coat I can feel the tightness of his muscles which were fixed from many laboring weeks. Just _all_ of him. His arms around me. The way he moves, curls around me every time he lifts his arm to spin me .

I have to be careful. I don't want to be overly enthusiastic about dancing with him, but the urge to melt into Ky's skin is so overwhelming, it takes everything in me to resist.

I feel Ky's lips on my ear and his breath makes me warm from the inside out.

"I have a poem to tell you," His words whisper like the beating of a butterflies' wings, and I shudder, but not because of the cold.

It's hard keeping my voice level. "Not part of the Hundred Poems?"

He shakes his head, says, "I wrote it myself," and grins. "Mostly just now."

We sink to the ground and proceed to make a small fire, and as soon as its orange flame was dancing light across the ground, Ky picks up a stick and begins tracing words into the dirt.

My eyes follow the curves written by his careful hand as lines are engraved into the canyon floor. And when Ky's done, I sit back and read in a murmur,

"_I've never named anything I've written before,_

_ "No reason to,_

_ "Since_

_ "It would all have the same title anyway:_

_ "—For you—"_

_ "But I would call this one_

_ "One night,_

_ "That night,_

_ "When we let the world be only you_

_ "And only me."_

After I stop reading, there's a long pause and Ky writes more.

"_We stood on it while it spun,_

_ "Green and blue and red_

_ "The music ended_

_ "But we_

_ "Were still_

_ "Singing."_

This time he's done.

And I'm touched. Speechless. There's nothing _to_ say. My mouth hangs open, and only when I close it I'm able to meet the shockingly blue eyes of Ky.

The distance between us closes abruptly as I wrap my arms around his neck. Ky starts.

Since I'm unable to look him in the eyes quite yet, I bury my face in his shoulder and just breathe in.

"Do you like it?" Ky whispers to me, fingers brushing across the sensitive skin of my neck.

"Like it?" I'm surprised to note the tears in my voice, though I'm not aware of crying. Trying to compose myself, I pull back and wipe my cheeks several times before being able to meet his eyes.

When I do, his expression is full of love.

"Like" is not a word for it. A term for the words—_our _words—written in the dust. Such a talent, putting your feelings down like that deserves more than just a word in return.

I put my hands on either side of Ky's face and kiss him.

Never mind the position we happened to be sitting in, never mind it's freezing outside, never mind our only companions were sleeping many, many feet in the cave above us. I just want some way to tell him how I'm feeling I've tried my hand at poetry, but only Ky can put his soul into it. My affection is all I can offer right now.

I'm pretty sure neither of us mind.

Ky wraps his arms around my waist but pulls back, ending the kiss with a quiet gasp of air. The intensity of his gaze on mine makes it impossible to look away.

"What are all these feelings I have?" he asks in a burning whisper, holding me close to him and searching my eyes for an answer. "What is it about you that makes me want to never let go?"

I don't have the answers he wants because I've always thought that about him as well.

Silence falls between us as our feeble fire dies away. Ky has his eyelids closed and touches my face with gentle fingers, tracing my cheekbones and the line of my jaw and my lips.

I reach up to put my hand over his and his eyes flutter open.

"Hey, Ky?"

"Yes?" A smile stretches across his mouth.

"I love you."

For some reason, it was harder to say that then than it ever had been. My throat burns as though I swallowed a pepper whole, but a better kind of burning. The almost-on-the-verge-of-crying kind of burn, except I'm not going to cry. I'm going to keep my eyes open and void of any tears because I don't want to miss a thing.

Ky's eyes reflects the world. He closes them and pulls me down against him, meeting lips with a soft pressure that sends a shiver up my spine. And the warmth, _his_ warmth.

I sneak my arms around his waist under his jacket, but my thumb accidentally grazes a spot of bare skin where his shirt rose up.

Ky lets out a surprised laugh that bubbles into my mouth and broke away. "Your hands are freezing!" he told me, still laughing.

"Sorry." I began taking them away from him but he stopped me.

Our fingers twine and he tucks both of my hands under the edge of his shirt. Though my heart flies up into my throat, I accept it. The arch of his hipbone fits around my palm as I experimentally sneak my hands a little higher to trace along the lines of his muscles.

Of course, I'm blushing. Madly. I caught my lower lip between my teeth and have trouble with keeping steady breaths. Our faces are inches apart, I straddle his lap, our arms are tangled around one another.

I'm not cold.

Somewhere above us Indie and Eli are asleep. Part of me worried for their safety, not being able to keep an eye on them at all times, but the other part of me isn't worried. I want to step out and yell my feelings to the world. They're too strong to keep bottled like I've been.

I'd be yelling for a long time.

**oOo**

_Yeah, this was going to be a lot longer but I lost interest and I know if I waited for more ideas to come I wouldn't EVER publish it. So YES, it's an incomplete oneshot, but in my eyes it's better than none at all. I didn't even bother editing it. It's far from perfect, I know. _

_So again, it's dedicated to my GORGEOUS Hannah. _

_I'm sorry if it wasn't as dirty as you had hoped._


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